I bought me a new NAS server QNAP TS-412. It has room for four hot swap ready HDDs. I inserted 3 Seagate ST32000542AS 2TB drives from the QNAP compatibility list, combined to one RAID5 volume. This was ran very smooth the first days. Great and easy setup, network performance is ok and including various features by default.
After three days i got waken up by a very loud beeping of the NAS. The front was blinking in red and the smart phone was vibrating by getting the error mails send by the NAS server.
The system log said Drive 2 plugged out. ( which i didn’t do ). The Volumemanager marked the drive with „Read/Write Error“. The RAID was „in degraded“ mode. After pulling the drive from slot 2 and insert into slot 4 the Volumemanger said „Ready“. After reinserting the drive into slot 2 it was marked as „Read/Write Error“ again.
After running a full block scan on the drive in slot 2 ( which took about 5 hours ), it was „Ready“ again and the RAID5 was renbuilding itself (which took another 10 hours).
The same thing happened again three days later and some days later again.
Currently the system is running stable after updating the firmware of the Seagate HDDs from CC34 to CC35.
I plugged the HDDs into another PC and upgraded the firmware from a bootable upgrade cd. The standard firmware update tool will not correctly recognize the HDDs firmware to upgrade them. You have to force the update:
- Download the bootable cd image: http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=213915
- Burn the image to a CD
- Plug the drive to any native SATA controller ( this will not work with an external USB drive ). Make sure that the controller is in IDE/ATA mode and not in RAID or AHCI mode. To be sure please unplug all other drives and make a backup of your data before. I had not data loss after the upgrade, but just to be sure …
- Boot from the CD
- Press „Esc“ to skip over the disclaimer
- Press „ctrl“ + „c“ within the option menu and confirm by pressing „y“. You will enter the command line mode.
- Enter the following line to start the forced upgrade:
FDL486A.exe -m Hepburn -f HECC358H.LOD -s -x -b -v -a 20 - The update will begin and prompt if ready. Restart your maschine and check if the new firmware was installed correct.
I hope this will help you.
cheers.
Sebastian